The Weight of Knowledge
by snowflake07
Summary: Knowledge can be a heavy burden. Sometimes ignorance isn't bliss, but it's more bearable. Full summary inside.


Disclaimer: Don't own Bleach, nor its characters. They belong to T. Kubo.

A/N:No lemons here for once, but deals with mature themes. I apologize in advance if the writing style is weird, I was playing around with a lot of different things. Kind of AU. Follows along the line of an idea I can't get of my head: Ulquiorra and Orihime are bound together by the soul. An exploration of the intimacy and intricacy of such a relationship. What might they learn about each other and themselves?

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The Weight of Knowledge

Knowledge can be a heavy burden. Sometimes ignorance isn't bliss, but it's more bearable.

As time wears on they mature. The novelty of their relationship is gone. He is afraid of her now for completely different reasons than during the Winter War. Being bound to her soul has a price that neither one of them realized they would have to pay.

Life leaks and bleeds between the two of them. Memories come unbidden and unwanted. He has learned things about her that he wishes he never knew. And he's certain the same is true for her. They cannot hide from themselves or from each other. They each know this now.

He has learned the meaning of emotions through her.

**Guilt** as she cowers under her bed trying to drown out the sound of her brother's beating—a beating that should've been hers. Sora lied to spare her, to protect her. It is what big brothers do for little sisters. He, personally, wouldn't know.

He learns **helplessness** as she looks on his injuries the next day and **sorrow** as he watches her leave her brother behind, alone, to go to school. He learns **shame** as he watches school children pick on her for her strange hair and tattered clothes. He learns **grief** at the same as she, when she learns that Sora is dead. He finds that it might be possible that she does know what it means to truly despair, that she may indeed know what is to be alone.

He has watched her heart break countless times; felt the loss of innocence… has lived it through her.

He knows the same is true for her.

He knows she has watched him grow up alone, abandoned by parents he never knew. She has watched him pop in and out of foster homes, has watched him go hungry and homeless. She has watched and lived, just as he had with her, the abuse suffered at the hands of those who were meant to protect. She has watched him take his first life, out of self-defense and necessity. She has watched him take others out of arrogance, for pleasure, for the simple fact that he could. He has lived, died, and lived again for far longer than she.

She has felt the bones of necks snap in her palms and felt the warm, sticky sensation of blood coating her fingers. She has felt bodies grow cold and watched the soul's light wink out of his victims' eyes, just as he has. They have been each other's conduit.

He knows that she hates him for it—that on some nights his touch repulses her, as does hers for him…on some nights. On bad nights, when he wakes from terrible images that he knows are not nightmares—nights when he has seen her father's dirty hands grope and fondle her too young body; nights when he remembers his own hands groping bodies far too old in exchange for a decent meal—he hates her too.

He hates that she knows these things about him…that these demons cannot be locked away from her. There is nothing that one can keep private from the other. Because they share a soul, _everything_ about him is hers and _everything_ about her is his. There are no secrets, no places for the demons of past lives to hide. These things…these memories they kept locked from themselves have come to light in the other. It creates vulnerability. What does one do with knowledge such as that? He knows they cannot undo the past nor would they ever disgrace each other by bringing it up. But each of them knows that the other _knows._

She had asked him once. "Ulquiorra, do you dream?"

He'd been distracted and nodded absently, absorbed in his task, He can't remember now what it was.

"Do you ever dream of me?"

Warning bells should have fired then, but again in distraction, he simply nodded.

"Do you ever dream of me as a child? Have you…" he remembers that her voice broke then, that tears dripped from her chin. He remembers the eerie silence of the room.

"Have you seen…seen things that you shouldn't have?"

She doesn't mention what kind of things or even if these things are about her, but instead she reaches out a delicate hand and places it over the hole in chest. The hum of spiritual pressure pulses beneath it. He thinks back on nights when she has started out of her own nightmares, ones she never talks about, and he realizes that she has also seen things that she should not have.

Grey eyes meet green ones. He doesn't say anything but something in his face gives him away. A look of realization comes over her features. Her eyes widen, water, and more tears fall. A small gasp is torn from her lips and then she is sobbing into his chest, her hand fisted in his shirt.

They never speak of it again, neither _those_ kinds of dreams nor the moment of realization that they both had them. A month passes before she can look at him again. He is happy for the reprieve because he finds that he feels uncomfortable with the notion of facing her again. He doesn't know why he cares that she knows these things about him, other than the fact that it makes him feel weak. But there must be more to it than that. Perhaps it is because it makes him feel human.

He understands, now, her lack of fear—the mask of naïvety. She is not a foolish girl but a self-preserving one. In that they are similar. It baffles him that they are at such polar extremes. The she could be so pure, so effulgent while him so dark and somber. The woman told him once that were two halves that make one whole; the balance to two broken lives. There are days when he thinks they can only taint each other, and other days when he would like to think she is right.

On all the other days, the majority of the days when life for them is fairly normal, realism sets in. He can look at her again without hate or fear or discomfort. She cannot hold any power over him that he cannot hold over her. Their souls are bound. They are not together because fate willed it or because they belonged together. They are together because she made a calculating decision in the middle of a war to gain a tactical advantage. They are together because she has a power that steps on the toes of gods. She intervened and she chose, for whatever reason, he still does not know, him over Ichigo Kurosaki. She is his, her life—her entire being is his. And in turn, he is hers. His entire existence, with all its demons, is hers. There is safety in that knowledge, security in it. Their pasts can't leak beyond them, each is guarded by the other. These demons, then, that the two of them share - this knowledge- is not quite so burdensome when considered in that light.

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R&R, please and thank you!


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